Parliamentary deliberations were canceled Tuesday after opposition parties boycotted a lower house session because the Finance Ministry had not presented land sale documents related to allegations of cronyism leveled at Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.
The documents pertain to the sale at a heavily discounted price of state-owned land to a school operator linked to Abe's wife Akie. The transaction has attracted renewed attention after The Asahi Shimbun reported Friday that the sale documents were falsified.
Some 8,770 square meters of land in Osaka were sold to Moritomo Gakuen in June 2016 for about 134 million yen ($1.2 million), far below the plot's appraised value of 956 million yen.
The original transaction document described the dramatically discounted sales price as "exceptional," but that word was missing in the version previously shown to some lawmakers, according to the Asahi report.
Kazushige Tomiyama, deputy director general of the Finance Ministry's financial bureau, said in the Diet on Tuesday that the original document had been given to prosecutors so the ministry no longer had it.
That response triggered a strong backlash by opposition parties, which have demanded the Finance Ministry submit both documents.
Three Diet sessions, including the lower house budget committee, were canceled Tuesday, and the House of Councillors plenary session Wednesday will not be held.
"If (the Asahi report is) true, not only Finance Minister Taro Aso but the entire government will be held responsible," said Kiyomi Tsujimoto, Diet affairs chief of the main opposition Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan.
Aso, who doubles as deputy prime minister, said at a press conference that not only relevant officials but the entire ministry will look into the matter.
Osaka prosecutors arrested the head of Moritomo Gakuen and his wife in July for fraudulently receiving public subsidies for its school businesses.
The school operator planned to build a private elementary school on the land purchased at the heavily discounted price, but the plan was abandoned due to the scandal. Akie Abe was the honorary principal of the envisioned school, but resigned the post after the land sale drew public attention.
The government is suspected to have discounted the land price due to her role in the school project, an allegation the prime minister and government officials have denied.
Yasunori Kagoike, who headed Moritomo Gakuen at the time of the deal, and his wife Junko have been indicted on unrelated subsidy fraud charges.
